Sediment Current thought conceptualises broad1 data as one layer of data overlaying another usually onto some base-data; the base-data being useful and referable to the user. These base-data may be absolute geographic coordinates, relative artefact coordinates – being eye-tracked say, or navigation pathways through websites. The key feature is that the base-data is a common dimension among the datasets which will be layered, and are relevant to the area of inquiry.

One of my ‘A History of HCI in 15 Papers’* “ The Star system (circa 1980, and as described in Byte**[1]**) gave rise to five principles, which in my opinion, are so important and timeless that their formulation and practical application as part of the Xerox Star user interface was without doubt revolutionary.” The Xerox ‘Star’ was a commercial version of the prototypical Xerox Alto – if one thousand fully working systems, used internally at ‘PARC’ day-in-day-out over seven years, can be said to be prototypical.

“Of the 49 articles, 45 claimed to have uncovered effective interventions. Thirty-four of these claims had been retested, and 14 of these, or 41 percent, had been convincingly shown to be wrong or significantly exaggerated. If between a third and a half of the most acclaimed research in medicine was proving untrustworthy, the scope and impact of the problem were undeniable.” Well I’m really heartened to see scientific debate progressing as it should do.

Eleni Michailidou passed here PhD defence with flying colours and now her work ‘Visual Complexity Rankings and Accessibility Metrics’ is published. I’ll let her abstract tell the story but this is some really interesting work. The World Wide Web (Web) has become the major means of distribution and use of information by individuals around the world. Web page designers focus on good visual presentation to implicitly help users navigate, understand, and interact with the content.

I’ve been trying to get a survey paper published titled ‘Emerging Technologies and Web Accessibility: Research Challenges and Opportunities’ but to no avail. It seems it is not useful for accessibility - or the technical details are ’too’ technical; what have we come to. Anyhow I thought that I’d publish an extract here instead. This is a technological review article focused on identifying both the research challenges and opportunities for further investigation arising from emerging technologies.

The scientific method is based on empirical data and the replicability of those experiments used to collect this data by third parties. However, in Human Computer Interaction (HCI / CHI) the ability to replicate experiments is not possible because there are no peer reviewed routes for data publication. This inability to replicate experiments due to a lack of public data means that HCI does not strictly follow the scientific method, and as such is sometimes seen as not rigorous.

MOSI1 is currently hosting the ‘Da Vinci the Genius’ exhibition, which is described as: …the most comprehensive and inspiring exhibition about the man who is arguably the greatest genius the world has ever seen. Working from Leonardo’s codices, Italian Artisans have faithfully crafted interactive and life-size machine inventions. These works include the first concepts of a car, bicycle, helicopter, glider, parachute, SCUBA, submarine, military tank and ideal city to name a few.